Stop me if you’ve heard this before because I went from telling no one to telling everyone. When I was a child, I would close the door to my bedroom and stack blocks up against it. Then I would go to sleep on my back so that I could place the top of a cookie tin on my chest. These were the precautions I would take to ensure my parents didn’t murder me. My parents never spanked me, so it was a bit of a leap that they would stab me in the chest while I slept. Or at least attempt to stab me. In theory, the tin would deflect the knife so I could roll away and I guess clobber my parents over the head with the lamp by my bed before leaping out the window and running off into the woods where I would learn to live among the wild animals. It may have been an ill-conceived plan as well as delusional. Until the age of 25, I had only told one person this; a therapist I was made to see when I was in elementary school. Now I don’t remember telling Mr. E this, but I must have because my mom knew about my fear. When I finally told the story at a stand-up show my mom was at, she said that I had developed that fear because of OJ Simpson. The news was constantly pushing the narrative that the reason OJ killed Nicole was because he loved her so much. Being my parent’s only shared child, I definitely felt an immense amount of love, so naturally I was to be butchered by them. That’s at least what I told my therapist. The only thing that makes little sense is that I remember having the fear when my parents were still married and when OJ’s murder trial came along, my parents marriage, much like the famous glove, was not a fit. They had been divorced for years. So I think I must have simply used the OJ thing to appease my therapist because even at eleven I knew it was not the healthiest thing to think your parents would murder you with no motive to point to. That would be the beginning of my relationship to OJ Simpson and since then, his actions have never not reassuringly dumbfounded me.
Not being a fan of football or the Naked Gun franchise made me two things: UnAmerican and unaware of who OJ Simpson was. As a child, I first learned of him when the news was covering his Ford Bronco racing down the LA freeway while he sat in the backseat with a gun to his head. Then when I learned he was an actor and before that, a hall of fame football player, I was pretty stunned. For me OJ went from obscurity to omnipresence. And with amazing consistency, OJ has always been at the center of my most gobsmacked reactions to culture.
After the Bronco chase, I was convinced he would be found guilty. He was not. America and I were stunned. He resumed his life playing golf. The way I guess an innocent man would, but still, it was unsettling. He then wrote a book detailing how he committed the murders, but he only agreed to write it if it was presented as a hypothetical. The book is titled If I Did It. The Goldman family got rights over the book when they sued him in a civil case, so they changed the presentation of the book to read I Did It; Confessions of the Killer. The “If” was still there but it was in tiny font inside the “I.” A book could be written about the writing of this book. There’s ten pages of transcript from his interrogation with the police where they’re asking him about his Dungarees (a brand of pant I remember being unpopular but affordable).
Then he was later arrested for attempted robbery. Pretty surprising. He was found guilty of that and sentenced to prison. Even more surprising. Only if because he was so clearly guilty of murder and got off, there was the speculation that he could get off of a lesser crime. Ok, well surely that will be the last I hear of OJ, or at least it has to be as crazy as it is going to get.
The documentary OJ: Made In America is released and in it I learn that after being found not guilty, OJ hosted a prank show where, among other things, he would be the drive-thru attendant at an Orange Julius, and attempt to sell people a Ford Bronco. He also released a music video where he rapped while topless women danced on him. Again, I could not believe how he continually primed me to expect anything from him, and I still couldn’t fathom what he would do.
Then he got released from prison and started tweeting and uploading videos of himself talking about football. It’s strange how ordinary this sounds compared to the rest of his antics and yet it still feels very odd. Like I guess I thought he would stay out of the spotlight. But instead, he just tried to pick up his life as if he hadn’t been a murderer and an armed robber.
Then he died. And when I got the news alert, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I can’t articulate why. Everyone dies. I guess I just never thought about his mortality. He seemed to have lived and died a dozen different lives so the idea that his last one was over just sort of hit me like a lead balloon. Well, at least in death he can’t be an OJ(ack) in the box.
Nope! He had one more chair to pull out from under me. After his death, the rappers Cam’Ron and Ma$e posted a eulogy of sorts on their Instagram page for their sports radio podcast. Along with the words of mourning (which I thought were sarcastic at first), they shared clips from their show where they had OJ on to talk football. Clips. As in multiple clips from multiple appearances. Two 90s rappers with silky smooth voices were interviewing the most famous living murderer about what he thought about football while he was secretly dying of cancer and drinking blueberry juice in a wine glass. I know the details of that last part because it was one clip. Even with everything that preceded OJ’s swan song of podcast commentary, I couldn’t believe it. It almost defies science how someone can be so consistently surprising.
People always want to infer and ponder what OJ says about America. I don’t know if he says anything about America. OJ is not representative of anything that America is known for because at every turn, he inverts even the most radical of American cornerstones. Sports, race, money, criminal justice, celebrity, parody, social media, death. One would think if nothing else, OJ’s follies were comedic because comedy comes from surprise and inevitability. OJ should be perfect comedy because the only thing inevitable about his behavior is how surprising it is. But defyingly it’s not even that because for comedy to work you can’t be that surprising that consistently. The audience can’t form expectations and if they can’t have expectations, you can’t meet them. You only disorient them. And I suppose that’s the only thing OJ’s existence has really done. He made people with illogical and fractured relationships to the world around them (me, a kid who thought his parents were going to kill him) feel connected because he brought out that disorienting feeling in so many. I want to be clear; he doesn’t get any points for that. I’m not glad he lived. I guess I’m relieved. Relieved that, OJ seemed to extinguish the idea that any of us could be so removed from logic that we wouldn’t find his continued antics butt-fucking-baffling. It’s a strange kind of salve.